'No easy answers to universal questions' says award-winning filmmaker

Australian filmmaker Charles Williams makes clear his award-winning film All These Creatures is "not a public service announcement".

The 13-minute short has won 20 awards since it premiered in 2018, including the prestigious Short Film Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

Charles Williams says he's not interested in “lecturing people on false solutions and easy answers”.Credit:Steven Siewert

Williams has made comedic short films most of his career and the global success of All These Creatures, which is "a bit closer to the bone than my other films", came as a surprise.

Set in Dandenong, in the outer suburbs of Melbourne, All These Creatures follows a 12-year-old Ethiopian-Australian, Tempest, as he observes his father's mental health unravel.

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But the Australian writer, director and producer, who is now developing his first feature film, says he has no interest in “lecturing people on false solutions and easy answers”.

While the film is not autobiographical – "if I just spill out events from my life it means nothing" – Williams nonetheless drew on his own experiences for the script.

"It was really exhausting," he says. "As you’re writing something personal you’re dredging up all kinds of things, even if you don’t include them in the film. I was pretty depressed at the end of it."

Williams doesn't so much provide answers as he raises questions.

"The film was a way of mashing together these ideas that I’d been obsessed by since I was probably [Tempest's] age," Williams says. “Where does human personality come from? How much responsibility do we give people for their actions? And what mitigates that?”

Part of Tempest's journey includes his attempt to understand his father – what Williams describes as a universal experience of re-approaching the "mythic figures" we grow up with and trying to come to terms with them as regular people, especially if they have been unstable or volatile.

The film touches on domestic violence, which Williams grew up around.

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“[Tempest's] dad is wrong but the film doesn’t take an easy answer on why he’s wrong, or how we can all as a society fix that. Because it’s not fixable. Was his dad a bad person? Or was he a sick person? And what’s the difference?”

This approach has resonated widely, with the film picking up accolades around the world and buzz of a likely Oscar nomination.

"I think there’s a universality in how people repress things and don’t talk about them," Williams says.

Williams took an open approach to casting. When he cast young Yared Scott as Tempest and then brought on four Ethiopian-Australian advisors to read the script, "some of them thought it had already been written specifically about them," he says.

Yared Scott and Mandela Mathia play son and father in Williams' award-winning short film.

While Tempest's cultural background informs the film's context, the story focuses on the boy's relationship with his father.

"[White audiences] were sometimes going to watch the film thinking it was about refugees or migration or it was a political statement," Williams says. "I changed very subtle bits of voice over and elements of the film so that we acknowledged that expectation was there, and then put it to rest.

"My taste in film is not those that are there to be political or tell us things ... You’ve got the Academy award-winning story of the underdog, but I always like stories about people who are a little bit more damaged and complicated.

"Those movies help you go, ‘I’m them too’ ...''

All These Creatures will have its NSW premiere at Flickerfest, which runs from January 11-January 20.